Month: August 2024

Dreams For Suckers

Marketing / Advertising

Here’s an irresistible offer assuming, that is, you want to live on Planet Manhattan:

For most, owning an apartment on the Upper West Side just minutes away from Central Park is an expensive dream.

However, New York City apartments in the prime location complete with hardwood floors and air conditioning, are being sold for as little as $174,000.  Studio apartments are estimated at $173,801, while one-bedroom flats will cost around $184,990.

But there is a catch. The cheap properties, located within a five-storey walk-up pre-war building, are being sold through a lottery open only to those earning below a certain income.  Only households with an annual income of around $150,000 or less – 120% of New York’s median income — will qualify for the draw.

Sounds good, dunnit?  The company is giving people of lesser income (that would be too little to afford to live in NYfC) a chance to get in there — a very laudable goal.  Read on:

Applicants must use the home as their primary residence and may not currently own or have previously owned a property.

That’s good.

Interested buyers must also have 5% of the purchase price to hand in order to make a down payment.

Also reasonable.

Those looking to get their hands on one of the 17 units in at 165 West 80th Street must enter the draw by the deadline on August 27.

That’s kinda soon for a purchase of this magnitude, don’t you think?  (Anyone who’s ever bought a car will recognize this little line;  “Offer only good through this weekend!” or “There are two other guys interested in this deal.” )

…which brings me to my next point.  Most likely, there are going to be far more buyers than apartments, what finance people call “oversubscribed” in the market.  Which is fine, but my antennae — already twitching — lead me to ask one simple question:

Does one have to purchase a ticket or pay some kind of fee to enter this particular little lottery?

Because if so, the organizers are going to make a shitload of money from the potential buyers before the first apartment is sold because regardless of the ticket price, there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of applicants wanting in on the deal.

If not, and the entry is based solely upon proof of financial qualification, then all is well, more or less.

But I can’t but help thinking that there’s a scam in all this, somewhere.  As the old (and wise) saying goes:  when a deal is too good to be true, it usually is.  And apart from the obvious question (who would want to live in a five-floor walk-up in Manhattan nowadays?), this one seems to be just that.

I’ve seen apartments in Manhattan, and most are absolute shit — especially in older buildings.  Offering a “floor and A/C” isn’t much, and if the place needs substantial work — at Manhattan-level prices — then the deal is going to cost a ton of money.  And if the organizers have already refurbished the apartments –also at Manhattan-level prices — then how are they going to make money on so low a price?

Feel free to argue the point, in Comments.

Blackmail, Pure And Simple

Men & Women

It appears that I’m not alone in hating this recent trend of a guy surprising his girlfriend by proposing to her in front of a large crowd of people.

Public proposals appear to have added an extra fear factor for women hoping to stay out of the spotlight and avoid online ridicule for saying no.

Rejection videos shared online are met either with support or shaming, demanding a ‘yes’ to save their partner humiliation.

Actually, I think that any asshole who subjects his future wife to this kind of emotional blackmail deserves the public humiliation if she rejects him.  And if she wants to show her rejection in a more ummm aggressive manner, that’s her prerogative.

You may disagree with me on this, but you’d be wrong.

Innocent Times, Part 4

Classic Beauty, Funny Stuff

…in which we continue to look at earlier, more innocent times.  That said, some of the cartoons below were not so innocent — and probably couldn’t get published today.

Which. of course, is why I’m posting them.

From the H.R. files:

In Medical Ethics:

And in the Groves of Academe:

Another from H.R.:

In Sporting News:

And In Flagrante Delicto:

See you all next month.

Forgot to mention:  if you want to see the first couple of these, use the “Search” function at the top of the page and just type: Innocent Times then hit Enter.

That Garage Thing Part 1 – The British Invasion

Drive Time

Former Drummer Knob wrote to me, enclosing a listing for a house in Plano, and mischievously asked:  “It’s in your neighborhood.  Would you buy it?”

I have no idea why Knob would be looking at a house in Plano (from his penthouse in Monaco), but whatever.  I’ve shared the link but by the time this is posted, it will probably already have been sold — houses in the swanky Willow Bend neighborhood seldom last long on the market.  Still, it provoked a train of thought in me because, unusually for a house in the $2.5 million range in that area, it had four garages (most have only two or three).

You can probably guess where this is taking us, because I’m a total slut when it comes to cars and my likes and loves change quite promiscuously depending on what I happen to be looking at.

Nevertheless, I’m currently locked on a mindset which asks the question:  “If I wanted to escape the modern trend in cars of electronic everything, basically a four-wheeled laptop which has the added benefit of spying on your every move, would I be prepared to sacrifice some of the modern characteristics, e.g. reliability or handling, for that freedom?”

And the answer is, “Yes.  But I’d have to have backup.”

It’s no good having a car you love and adore when it’s in the mechanic’s hands and you need to make a grocery- or liquor store run.  One funny guy remarked on these very pages that if you collect vintage cars, you actually need more than one, for this precise reason.  (“Two is one and one is none… actually, sometimes even three is none.”)

But a 4-car garage certainly gives you the opportunity to indulge yourself.

So here’s my current list — for some reason I’m on a British kick at the moment, so a couple may be familiar from recent posts — of three desirable beauties that would make parts of me throb every time I opened the garage door:

1966 Austin Healey Mk III

1956 Jaguar XK140

!968 Jag E-type Series 2

Alert Readers will notice some similarities:  stick shift, wooden dashboard, leather seats etc.

“But Kim,” I hear, “didn’t you say you had a four-car garage available at your lottery-winning house in Plano?”

Indeed I did.  But given the history of the above three when it comes to reliability, I would have to have a car that would be absolutely guaranteed to start every time I turned the key, and for that, I’m afraid I’d have to forsake British cars because

Yup, I’d have to go Japanese if I wanted a supremely-reliable sports car.  And here it is:

1999 Acura (Honda) NSX

All the performance I’d ever need, matchless reliability, and as befitting its relative modernity, in crass shouty-yellow.  Also with a stick shift, of course.

But I know that some people are going to laugh at my fondness for old British cars, so next week I’ll go all-European, applying the same criteria for my selections.

No Excuse?

Sports

Here’s a little bit of silliness from Formula 1, from Lewis Hamilton:

Lewis Hamilton has called for a Formula One race to be held in Africa, claiming that there is “no excuse” for the sport not to return to the continent.

There has not been a Grand Prix in Africa since the 1993 South African GP, with Hamilton insisting that it is time for a comeback.

Asked if it was the right time for the F1 to return to Africa, Hamilton replied: “100 per cent. We can’t be adding races in other locations and continue to ignore Africa, which the rest of the world just takes from.

“No one gives anything to Africa. There’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done there. I think a lot of the world that haven’t been there don’t realise how beautiful the place is, how vast it is.

“I think having a grand prix there, it would really be able to highlight just how great the place is and bring in tourism and all sorts of things. Why are we not on that continent? And the current excuse is that there’s not a track that’s ready, but there is at least one track that’s ready there.

“In the short term, we should just get on that track and have that part of the calendar and then work on building out something moving forward.”

…because “equity”, you see.

Actually, I can see several reasons (not “excuses”) for Africa to be ignored by F1.

The only country capable of staging a Grand Prix is South Africa, with its Kyalami circuit north of Johannesburg.  I invite Lewis to visit the place — but without any kind of security (no bodyguards etc.).

If Kyalami were off the table, then Cape Town could probably build a street circuit (it’s been mooted before), as they did with the Formula E race last year.

But Formula E isn’t Formula 1, and it should be noted that Cape Town is Eco-Green Loony Central (which would no doubt please Hamilton).  The arrival of all those smelly, Gaia-destroying F1 cars is unlikely to find much support there.

Elsewhere in Africa, forget about it.  Unless Liberty Media were to undertake to build a new track in, oh, Kenya — the only African city outside South Africa with a halfway-decent airport — and build in all the infrastructure (electricity, water, roads etc.) to support it, it would never happen.

Even if they did — and they won’t — it would take years before the project would be completed.  With current trends, F1 will be racing wind-powered cars before that happens.

Don’t even think about any of the countries north of the Sahara either, because the infrastructure issues would be even worse than in South Africa, with the added flavor of radical Islam to spice things up.

Like all DEI dreams, the idea of a Grand Prix race in Africa sucks, for practical reasons.  But of course, when it comes to DEI, that nasty reality has no place — and Lewis Hamilton is no different from any other dreamer.